and how the aeroplane descended within a few hundred feet and dropped a bomb into the center of it, scattering its helpless occupants to the four winds.
When a man whom I know as well as I know Dr. Grenfell of Labrador comes back from his hospital in France and makes statements like these in the Outlook, we simply have to listen:
One of our doctors who was taken prisoner in the retreat from Mons was allowed to come back after ten months' imprisonment. Among other tales of horror he told us, I remember his saying that for inadvertently neglecting to salute a non-commissioned officer, the officer was ordered to come up and strike the doctor. The officer hit him under the jaw, knocking him right down. The doctor told us that a private had been bayoneted for resisting such brutality, and that he himself offered no resistance.
An old fisherman friend, lying wounded at Yarmouth, told me that after a submarine had sunk his sailing boat and turned the four men adrift at sea, the Germans fired a few shots at them as they rowed away. He was hit through the thigh—an unarmed fisherman.
A little boy of twelve, in a school kept by an American lady near Brussels, cried out "Vive la France" to some passing soldiers he took to be French. They halted and shot him at once.
"Are the Germans cruel?" Dr. Grenfell was asked, and he answers: "Systematically so. It is part of 'frightfulness.'"
Perhaps our reports of your "frightfulness" policy have been colored by the awful tension of men's minds; we hope so, Wilhelm. But we can't forget that after the Boxer outrages you ordered your soldiers so to conduct themselves that no Chinese would ever dare to look a German in the face again. Our own soldiers remember how yours acted in that day; and—-I remember my Prussian coachmen.
Putting it as kindly as I can, it still seems to me that in your passion for efficiency you have developed in the Prussian character a certain ruthlessness that gives scant regard to the rights of the weak in the world. And, Wilhelm, it's going to be hard for you and me to become really good friends again until you change that in the character of your people—until I can feel that in my business with them I am going to have a square deal, regardless of my physical power to enforce it.
Of course all the governments have lied a good deal to their people during the war. It will be a pretty good plan if you and all the rest of the kings and czars can work away from that habit after the war, because your people are coming back from the trenches with a good deal more of the "show me" spirit than they had before. You will remember, for instance, that when the war broke out you raised a shout that what you were really fighting for was to save civilization from the devastation of the Russian hordes. It was Russia that had started the war—and your people believed it.
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